A coffee cup with her lipstick stains; I guess I'll never see her again

We got our pet rabbit's ashes back today.

It was an ordinary call left on the answering machine and we'd get to the veterinary clinic as the center of our chores around town. Driving there we thought about how the place had gone from one of the spots around town that we kind of knew but never visited to somewhere we could drive while asleep and panicked. And we tried to estimate how many times we had gone there in 2016. The figure's surprisingly low for how much it looms in our memories of the year. Probably something like forty times, which isn't that many considering. He started going in weekly much more recently than feels like. It feels like it had been forever.

His ashes came in this lovely little wooden box. And were accompanied by a scroll with that Rainbow Bridge story on it. I had never heard of this before a couple yeas ago and now it's enough everywhere that the crematory they used is even named the Rainbow Bridge Pet Crematory. Also included were a receipt that noted our pet's breed and age, down to the half-year. We understand wanting to track as much information as possible to avoid, or at least identify, identity mixups. But who could tell the difference between a 10, 10 1/2, and an 11-year-old rabbit? I suppose they just take whatever the clinic tells them.

Most of the other chores were connected to him, it happens. bunny_hugger listed the various leftover things we aren't likely to use, or couldn't use before they expired, on a disabled-rabbits pet-owners site. We're sending out the leftover pain medicine, the baby blanket he had the last weeks of his life, the bunny diapers, all these things. We're keeping things that seem likely to be useful for when we're ready for another rabbit, like the food bowls and the fleece bedding and such. We can hope it does some rabbit some good.

On the way to the clinic we remembered we had empties, used syringes and the like, that we should have returned. We'd been bringing that sort of thing in with regular appointments so it could be safely disposed. I suppose I'll take them in next year, when there's time. There's always some little bit left unfinished.

Trivia: Frank Borman arrived at the San Antonio Aerospace Medical Center for screening on the 11th of July, 1962. James Lovell on the 13th.
Source: Moon Bound: Choosing and Preparing NASA's Lunar Astronauts, Colin Burgess. (William Anders was selected in the third astronaut group; Borman and Lovell were part of the second set.)